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Apple has been really mean to a lot of app developers. You can read about it here, here and here. But even then the bottom line will remain same; App developers will continue to worship iPhone with their lousy spent million dollar apps.

Although there are new app stores coming into the market from Nokia, Microsoft, Android (yeah, this ones quite old. I know), etc. the Apple App Store will remain the develooopa favoritiz. There are some good reasons to make a note of:

Apple will make sure iPhone stays consumer favorite. They’ve done it with Mac, iPod and iPhone is already super hot

So here’s another story that I wanted to share with fellow freelancers and my clients on how expensive so called “free” open source software can get.
This incident occurred a couple of times but only today that I realize how much expensive the open source bang wagon could be. You can call me a tube light for realizing this so late.
I worked on a Joomla 1.0.x (open source and quite an established php cms software) based project a year back for a niche community of houseboaters. We spent weeks configuring the site to make it work the way my client wanted. Adding new components, creating new components, complex customizations, design, SEO, templating, etc. etc. and it all looked good at the end. The client was very pleased and so was I for what I have created out of Joomla.

It all went fine until yesterday when the site got hacked and Google kicked it out of its search results. The traffic went down drastically leaving nothing but few thousand users. Turns out that my client wasn’t really paying attention to the growing security concerns of Joomla nor was he really interested in upgrading the scripts to the latest version. Anyways, I had to act quickly and figure out the best possible way of getting the site back on Google and make the site secure once again.
I spent one whole night researching and trying to figure out the problem.. finally I found the malicious code and removed it. You can read it here.
After getting it back on Google, our challenge was to make it secure. And the only way to do that was to upgrade to the latest version of Joomla and all the components, customizations etc.
The site has grown exponentially over the year and with so much customization, it has become quite difficult to bulk upgrade the site. Now the whole upgrade project costs almost same as getting a new site.
The point here is, although free open source software comes for free, you still need to shell out quite good amount of money to make it work the way you want. Plus, maintenance and regular monitoring is essential. This hidden cost of maintenance and upgrades could hurt your business model. So, make sure to include it.
Freelancers, a tip for you would be to explain the hidden costs to your clients and sign them for a maintenance contract!

About myView: myViews are totally my point of view of things I see in the industry. Could be a good analysis or just stupidity.

I used to see people create open source scripts/softwares and give out for free to the community and rely on donations to make few bucks out of it. Not really a good source of income but wouldn’t hurt if you do something as a hobby and people donate you some cash when they use it. But relying on donations may not fetch you as much as it would if you sell your script for a buck or two.

The way I see it, open source hobbyists are becoming smarter in business models and instead of giving the product for free, they are charging 99 cents to 5 bucks. A silly Magento CAPTCHA module I came across sells at $4.99 and most of the scripts from the vendor are of the same price. The vendor also has a community forum for people to help each other if they fall short of handling support tickets. With this kind of business model you (vendors or freelancers) are sure to make good profit. iPhone Apps are another good example of how people are being tempted to own an app for just 99 cents. Considering millions of downloads of each app, you will be quick to make a million.

My advice to freelancers building products in free time, sell your product for a buck or two rather than put it free.

About myView: myViews are totally my point of view of things I see in the industry. Could be a good analysis or just stupidity.